Notating a barre with vertical bracket in lilypond

Question

In certain books I found this version of notation for barre chords. It seems there are no built in ways to do it in lilypond.

Size of the bracket is important because it signifies how many strings the bared finger should span (e.g. all three treble strings in this example because the bracket starts at G). Then there are also two possibilities for barre to last only during the first chord (note) or longer (marked by dashed line in the top like in conventional barre notation).

How would it be possible to do this in lilypond, preferrably with a function that takes:

• a pitch of the lowest string (and possibly for the highest also),
• some music object and
• position on the board (or just text where a user might put the roman numeral)?

The last two requirements are very similar to conventional barres in lilypond but I havent found a way to combine them with the vertical bracket. I am not sure whethter arpeggio brackets would be suitable (flared ends of the bracket are not that important) beacuse they require a chord while barre marking does not.

Answer 1

You’re right, LilyPond doesn’t currently have a proper inbuilt way to do this. But, we can cobble together an arpeggio bracket and a text spanner to get a reasonable result.

---

Place a chord of two notes (that set the extent of the bracket) in a hidden voice. Apply an \arpeggio to this chord, but also use the \arpeggioBracket command to turn the arpeggio symbol into a bracket symbol.

See: https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/notation/expressive-marks-as-lines#arpeggio

---

We can get the (half-)barré number and spanning line with a custom text spanner:
\override TextSpanner.bound-details.left.text = \markup { \upright "₵VII" }

Start & stop this spanner with \startTextSpan & \stopTextSpan .

See: https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/notation/line-spanners

(I’ve also adjusted the default period and fraction of the dashes, and given it a nice brackety ending with some other overrides.)

---

Putting this all together:

\version "2.24.1"

\score {
    \new Staff {
        \clef "treble_8"
        \time 3/4
        <<
            {
                \override Fingering.staff-padding = #'()
                \override Fingering.add-stem-support = ##f
                \set fingeringOrientations = #'(up left left)
                
                \override TextSpanner.bound-details.left.text =
                    \markup {
                        \upright "₵VII "
                    }
                \override TextSpanner.dash-period = #2
                \override TextSpanner.dash-fraction = #0.5
                \override TextSpanner.bound-details.right.text =
                    \markup {
                        \concat {
                            \draw-line #'(1 . 0)
                            \draw-line #'(0 . -0.5)
                        }
                    }
                
                \tuplet 3/2 {
                    <d' f'-1 d''-4>8 \startTextSpan
                    c''_3
                    b'_1
                }
                a'4_4 
                f'_1 \stopTextSpan |
            }
            \\
            {
                \hideNotes
                \arpeggioBracket
                <g e'''>2. \arpeggio |
            }
            \\
            {   
                \voiceTwo
                d2.-0 \pp |
            }
        >>
    }
}